The is my second post chronicling the real world ins and outs of building a business around the production and ranking of promotional YouTube videos on Google. If you somehow find yourself reading this without having reviewed the first installment, it’s probably a good idea for you to start here.

So, when I last left you, I had just posted a short video on YouTube featuring a local law firm, chosen for this experiment based on their proximity to my home and other criteria outlined in the previous post. They’re not an active client of mine (yet) but that’s the point of the exercise… To find out if this pursuit is truly the stuff of a viable business model. One week in, let’s see how our video is doing.

The image on the right represents a composition of screenshots depicting the first page returned on YouTube when executing a search on, “San Diego Employment Lawyer”, a term we qualified previously using Google’s Keyword Planner. Despite the video’s short run-time (a challenge discussed in the previous post) and minimal promotional effort, our video has debuted at a respectable #8 on page 1. This was achieved doing little more than following some basic practices when preparing and uploading the video to YouTube, and then blogging about it here on my own website. Just for the heck of it, I also posted the video in the “Legal Services” section on Craigslist, but was disappointed to find hyperlinking disabled in that part of the site. Maybe it will get the video some views (which is certainly good), but no potential SEO gains will be realized by what would have been a decent back-link.

Okay… So that’s the story on YouTube, what about Google?

Not so much… I only looked at the first two pages after plugging in our targeted keywords and our video is nowhere to be found. Even looking at two pages is really unnecessary because let’s face it, if you’re not on page one, you might as well forget it. Last I checked, something like 88% of users on Google never get to page two when conducting a search, so if we’re to build a business on this, it’s page one or nothing. Now what?

Much of modern SEO is about building quality back-links so what I’ve got to do now is some research to identify some heavily trafficked legal sites where I might be able to post the video. This is where the real SEO work is going to kick in, and in the next installment, I’ll go over the campaign I’ll be putting together in order to get this thing some love on Google. We’ve laid some respectable groundwork and got right into the top ten on YouTube, but there’s still work to be done.